Thursday, September 10, 2009

X-41 World Championship-Marina di Scarlino starts next Wednesday

The X-41 World Championship, organized by the Yacht Club Italiano, the Club Nautico Scarlino and with the support of X-Yachts Italia, kicks off on September 13th at La Marina di Scarlino. 15 yachts from 7 countries Spain, Ireland, Estonia, United Kingdom, Malta, Slovenia and Italy have entered the event so far.

The program

Registration and measurement procedures will begin on Sunday 13th and continue until Tuesday 15th: crews will be weighed, sails measured in accordance with Class parameters and yacht displacement checked. All this to ensure that all competitors start off from a leveled playing field.

Racing will start on Wednesday September 16th at 12 o’clock, and will continue every day through Saturday 19th. Sunday September 20th has been set aside as a reserve day should the 4 races needed to validate the Championship not have taken place in the preceding days.

A maximum of 3 race will be held per day on a windward-leeward course.

The X-41 Yacht

The X-41 is the one-design of the Danish shipyard X-Yachts which put on the market in 2006, following the great success of yard’s one-design X-35.

Just like its “smaller brother”, the X-41 is a high performance boat, extremely responsive when racing and perfect for short cruises.

According to X-41 Class rules, all boats must be identical, except for the sail fabric. Sails and factory can be chosen according to each owner’s preferences.

A strong restriction, imposed by the shipyard on the Class, consists in the number of professional sailors allowed on board: maximum 4 Group 3 ISAF athletes. This should guarantee that racing happens on equal footing. The Helmsman must be the owner of the yacht or a sailor belonging to the Group 1 ISAF category.

Thanks to these strict guidelines, racing will be challenging for the crews and spectacular to watch: given the marginal speed difference between boats there will be a number of “close encounters” at mark roundings and neck-to-neck finish line crossings.

Participants

There is a growing number of X-41 boats in Italy, and some of best world’s sailors will be on board, often in the role of tactician. Just to name a few: Lorenzo Bressani and Tiziano Nava will race on Lady X-41, owner Piergiorgio Ravaioni; Francesco De Angelis will be on Le Coq Hardì, Daniele Cassinari on Siderarcordis, and Tommaso Chieffi on WB Five.